Lab Assignment 2: Analyzing Linked Jazz

The DH project I have decided to analyze is Linked Jazz. Linked Jazz is a project that uses historical jazz documents and interviews in order to find the connections between jazz musicians. It then visualizes these connections using a network map.

Source

The source of the data for this project comes from over 50 transcriptions of oral interviews. These interviews came from the Hamilton College Jazz Archive, Rutgers Institute for Jazz Studies Archives, Smithsonian Jazz Oral Histories, UCLA’s Central Avenue Sounds Series, and the University of Michigan’s Nathaniel C. Standifer Video Archive of Oral History. Additionally, the list of names initially used was the list of jazz musicians from DBPedia.

Processes

There were multiple processes for this project. The authors had to transcribe multiple oral interviews from many different jazz musicians. Each musician mentioned is given a profile on the system. Finally, a program breaks down the transcripts into a Q&A format to identify the relationship type two musicians had.

Presentation

The authors present this data as a network visualization. Users who click on a specific musician get a close-up view of that musician and all the other musicians they are linked to. The tool links to Wikipedia pages of specific musicians and the transcription of their connection.

Question

A possible question I have is whether the authors had a checking process for their analysis tool to ensure it accurately identified relationships.

In-class Discussion Questions

What is the goal of this project?

The goal of this project is to identify and categorize the links between jazz musicians through interviews. This allows us to see which jazz musicians other jazz musicians credit with influencing them or encouraging their work. It also gives us a visual representation of something as complicated as human relationships.

Which academic fields (i.e. history) do you see the project in conversation with?

I see this project mostly in conversation with music and history. This project gives historians and musicians alike an idea of who influenced specific musicians, which can be analyzed in the similarity of their music or other areas. There are so many different things you could do with this data!